The 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics wrapped its first 10 days on Peacock [NASDAQ: CMCSA]. While it drew a smaller daily mobile audience than prior games but the people who did come, watched more.
Comparing the past three Olympic Games on Peacock, Average Time Spent per DAU is up for all age groups for these Winter Games, with the exception of the 36-45 bracket. Older users, those aged 46+, saw the largest increase over the Summer 2024 games, at 48.5%. They are watching more than 90 minutes of Olympic coverage a day on their phones. This may sound shocking but it makes sense given that older Americans are now spending more time on their phones than younger Americans.
Daily active users are down 9% compared to typically more popular Summer Games of 2024, but DAUs have nearly doubled, increasing 92% from Day 1 to Day 10. For context, Winter 2022 saw a 35% Day 1-to-Day 10 rise and Summer 2024 just 27%.
“Comcast has been explicit that live sports, e.g. the Olympics, NBA, and the Super Bowl, are the engine it is betting on to drive Peacock’s subscriber growth,” said Tom Grant, VP of Research at Apptopia. “But subscriber counts only tell part of the story. What our data shows is that the Winter Games are functioning as more than an acquisition event. Roughly a quarter of Peacock’s Olympic audience were churned users who came back. Another quarter had never opened the app at all. The critical question now is how many of those resurrected and new users are still there when the torch goes out.”
Apptopia analyzed its consumer mobile panel to break down Peacock’s viewership so far; a little less than one third (27%) were new users to Peacock, who had never had a session on the app before. A little less than that (23%) we defined as Resurrected Users. These are people who had “churned” but were re-engaged by the Olympics. The remaining 50% of users were already active users of Peacock.
This means the Winter Games functioned less as a pure acquisition play and more as a full-funnel lifecycle tool, reactivating lapsed subscribers while deepening engagement among the existing base.
